Richard House on 'The Kills'

Richard House's latest book, "The Kills," is a four-part thriller that looks at the Iraq War.

Richard House's latest book, "The Kills," is a four-part thriller that looks at the Iraq War. (Kelvin Ma, Chicago Tribune)

Kevin Nance

Richard House discusses the intersection between literary writing and the thriller

It isn't often that literary fiction mixes successfully with the thriller genre. The delicate balance between the rich texture and characters of the former with the propulsive narrative momentum and puzzle-solving aspects of the latter is fiendishly difficult to pull off. But in his massive and engrossing "The Kills," a four-part novel set in the shadowy worlds of espionage, defense contractors, military hospitals and more during the Iraq war, novelist and onetime Chicagoan Richard House has taken on the challenge with gusto.

The result is a sprawling hybrid of a novel in which the author engages the tropes and delivers the entertainment value of a thriller while using the structure of the genre to explore large themes of history, identity, morality, outsiderness and displacement. Published last year in the United Kingdom to great acclaim — it became one of the rare books of its kind to be longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, Britain's equivalent of the Pulitzer — "The Kills" is both a gripping read and a scorching critique of the motivations and machinations of the Iraq War, including its run-up and aftermath.

Printers Row Journal caught up with House, 53, for a Skype interview from the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire, where he wrote parts of the "The Kills." Here's an edited transcript of our chat.

Q: You're an Englishman, of course, but you have roots in Chicago, I think?

A: Yes, I lived in Rogers Park from '87 to '97, at Lunt and Clark. I really loved it there.

Q: What brought you here from England?

A: The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where I got my MFA. I trained as an artist. I started writing there also, but I continued making public art projects, sculptural installations, with three other people from the Art Institute.

Q: The group was called Haha; interesting name.

A: (Laughs.) There was no real meaning behind it; we just needed a name that was, I guess, a little catchy.

Q: What led you to transition from visual art to writing?

A: I think some of the pieces I did early on at the Art Institute had people telling stories, and it was too cluttered. I had too much going on in terms of the visual and text. And the advice I got at the Art Institute was to maybe concentrate on the writing and see where that led — which was amazingly good advice. This was before they even had a writing program there, but my tutors and peers sort of encouraged me to just go for it, really.

Q: After 10 years here, I gather, you discovered that your visa was no longer in effect, so you had to go back to England.

A: Yes, Immigration said they'd allowed me to stay in one status for too long, and they couldn't give me any more time. I had 80 days to remain in the country, which started once they received my latest application, so I had something like two weeks to get out of the country.

Q: You had friends and family you had to say goodbye to.

A: I had a relationship here, yes. I also had Haha, which was exhibiting in museums in the U.S. and Europe. We were doing pretty well. It wasn't my intention ever to leave Chicago, that's for sure.

Q: Had the visa problem not arisen ...?

A: I definitely would still be in Chicago. Definitely. I was in a same-sex relationship, which wasn't seen as officially legitimate.

Q: Had you been married to a woman ...?

A: I would have been allowed to stay, yes.

Q: And that sense of displacement, of being wrenched away suddenly from one's home, informs a lot of "The Kills," I think.

A: Absolutely. I think each of the books more or less deals with somebody who's been taken out of their context and placed into one within which they don't really have any control.

Q: This is like asking about the concept of the Trinity, but is "The Kills" one book? Or four books?

A: It's a really good question. When I first wrote it, it was one big project with four separate elements, and the idea was that you could read these books in whatever order, or independently, and they would stand alone. In the event, I think they work much better as one unit. I think if you read just one book and set it aside, it would be quite a complicated project to re-engage with. When Picador first published it in the U.K., it came out digitally, one book a month. I thought that was a really smart idea, because it played with it being a series, and played with it being a unit at the same time.

Q: It's also a hybrid in terms of genre. How do you think of the book in terms of the thriller aspect vs. the literary aspect? Some people have described it as John le Carré meets Roberto Bolaño. Is it a literary novel or a thriller novel, or maybe both simultaneously, or some other thing entirely?

A: It's tricky, isn't it? My hope as a writer is to have my cake and eat it, too — to have a novel that takes its time, that has the set of extension and development that a literary novel has but isn't necessarily possible with a thriller or crime novel. At the same time, I'm interested in the propulsion of crime novels, and the expectations a reader has of a thriller, which is a certain amount of pleasure. But I would like it to go a little deeper.

Bolaño is interesting in that way, as is early Don DeLillo — they play with an extended form and very familiar genre-based elements. When I started writing the third book, "The Kill," the intention was just to write a thriller, a crime novel for myself, really, in which there would be no body, no solution, where you would look at an event from different people's perspectives. But at some point I wondered about the durability of that as a project, and set it aside.

Q: What is it that you feel you got from Bolaño, and how did that inform your book?

A: Bolaño is quite important, and "2666" is just a magnificent book. It's very complicated — sections of it are easily digested, and others are almost unpalatable and difficult. When I was writing the first book, "The Kill," I think I'd go to bookstores and look at the thousands of books and think, "Why add another?" And for a long period I just stopped writing.

It was only while looking at "2666" that I could see what he was doing was debating ideas, extending them over a very long canvas and scope. The structure of the book was intriguing, the intelligence of it was very seductive. And it made me interested in writing again. He was somebody dealing with present-day issues in a way that didn't feel like it was happening too much in contemporary literature; I didn't see a lot of people digesting the world the way he did. A lot of fiction tends to be very intimate, very familial, but in terms of looking at larger ideas — culpability, responsibility, what it means to be a citizen, how complicated life is — I didn't see it happening enough, but Bolaño was a great example.

Q: There's also way in which the crime novel, in certain hands — I'm thinking of Graham Greene — can lean in the literary direction. You felt like Greene was using the form of the crime novel to get at bigger things.

A: He's interesting too because he had certain books he categorized as literary, and certain ones he called entertainments. I definitely saw "The Kill," when I started it, as an entertainment. I set it aside, and later had fellowships at (artist colonies) Yaddo and MacDowell in the U.S., and started reading about Iraq. There was a lot in the papers about soldiers returning and problems that were happening at Walter Reed (Army Medical Center), problems with the hospitalization and treatments the soldiers were receiving there. And the writing became working through some ideas along those lines, and started including "The Kill" as an element of that.

Q: Did you follow the Iraq war closely as it was happening?

A: Yes and no. I was very conscious of it happening, day to day. I was factually aware, you might say. But what shook me when I started writing the book was how easily and readily I was to be uninformed, to be unanalytical about what was happening. It struck me time and time again: How could we enter another country without any consideration of its future? That astounds me. What we were presented with was an immediate threat, and when I looked back at it in hindsight, it seemed to be a lie. But I accepted it with ease. So when I was writing, I was thinking about how we swallowed it, really.

Q: There are recriminations going on to this day about the degree to which politicians such as Hillary Clinton, along with much if not most of the news media, accepted the administration line about the need to invade Iraq even though it was based on a lot of information that was, in hindsight, fairly obviously flawed, biased, what have you.

A: In hindsight, yes, and the consequences of that were terrible. But I didn't want to write a polemic on whether we should have gone to war or not, because that's being managed by people who are much better informed and intelligent about it than I am. What I look at in the novel, instead, are some of the day-to-day absurdities.

Q: Another part of your background that informs "The Kills" is the fact that your father was in the British military and a bomb exploded near him.

A: Yes, he was in the R.A.F., and was stationed unaccompanied for a while in Aden, which was struggling for independence from Britain. They were checking luggage of people going on aircraft, and there was a bomb in the luggage. The building being so fragile, it just collapsed, which meant that the people very close to the bomb were not severely wounded. That story comes in early in "Sutler."

Q: You were discussed in a recent USA Today piece on gay writers working in the thriller genre. What would you say gay writers bring to it that's different?

A: When I first started writing, I wrote a book called "Bruiser," and it was pretty much set in Chicago. It was a way of writing about intimacy between men during a period that was very difficult — with the rise of AIDS, and people not knowing what the causes were. When I returned to the U.K., I kind of felt that I'd lost my subject — that all the things that had motivated my writing had been ... not resolved, but were largely being addressed. A lot of the points I wanted to make about gay life were moot. There's debate about whether it's permanent, but as a gay man, I have significantly more rights in the U.K. than I did 20 years ago.

I think what's interesting about the thriller genre is that it's always included outsiders. It's always been about people who are excluded — because they're gay, because they're women, because of drugs, because of sex, whatever. This is the territory of the thriller, and I like the idea of approaching that from the perspective of somebody who's felt what it is to be an outsider. In the thriller, you have a propulsive story and a problem that needs to be resolved, but what it's really about is reading about the lives of others. It's a very comfortable fit for me. In "The Kill," for example, virtually all the characters are outsiders. They're all very vulnerable, for one reason or another. And the thing I can do is not make those people freaks, which can be a bit of a problem in thrillers.

Q: In Cold War thrillers, and more recently those about terrorism, that's what separates the good writers from the bad: the ability to humanize characters who might otherwise come off as cardboard.

A: I think it does nothing for anyone to attack. I wouldn't be interested in reading a book in which the stakes were too simplistic.

Q: That's why le Carré is so great. The heroes, so to speak, are often as bad or worse than the villains.